Between Heaven and Earth

Copyright © Linda Friedman Schmidt, Between Heaven and Earth, discarded clothing and home textiles, 68 x 41 in

Finding the Balance Between Heaven and Earth

We are all between heaven and earth seeking to find a balance in these turbulent times. There is a hunger to escape from the outer aspects of life, from the world presented to us in the news media: a world of illness, atrocities, inhumanity, and evil, a world of disposable humanity, disposable clothing, and indifference. There are also countless everyday responsibilities and obligations both real and perceived that leave us feeling starved for time and lacking serenity. For me making process-focused art is the way to find balance between the inner and outer, between self and other; it provides a sense of meditative calm, centeredness, and containment from chaos, a sense of fixity, something more enduring. Textiles bring me into a state of absorption and harmony, help me escape from the ordinary limitations of time and space.

Process Art

In process art the making of the work is just as important, if not more important, than the end product. The art is unique and original with no rules to follow, no right or wrong way to explore and create. The artwork is focused on the experience, on the exploration of techniques, tools, and materials. Process art is concerned with the actual doing; the artist can lose himself in its making. It is contemplative in spirit using a combination of repetitive behavior and single-focused concentration to free the mind and invite an inner tranquility.

I believe that artists are guided by a higher power. I never intended to include a yoga pose in “Between Heaven and Earth” but there it is, Tree Pose, a basic yoga pose used to attain inner peace and develop oneness within the self as well as unity with the exterior world. As in much process art, the subject of the work is the making of the work. In the pictured artwork the narrative is about the process of making the art, and at the same time, the process is part of the narrative. The process is an attempt to reconnect with the “hands of God” while the connection with the hands is part of the actual depiction.

Wear, Tear, Spiritual Repair

Wear, tear, and spiritual repair are the themes that course through my artwork created from discarded clothing. Worn garments embody humanity, provide a connection with others and their emotional energy. I interweave the energy of many to create something new which is much more than the sum of its parts. My process is painstaking, labor-intensive, and transformative: I tear and hand cut the clothes into strips then rearrange and piece them together in a more pleasant way to create a new whole. I deconstruct a troubled world, reconstruct and mend it, transform the ordinary into extraordinary, connect with something more enduring to forget the outer aspects of life, use the artwork as a pathway to a higher spirituality.

In an age when appropriation is common and art is frequently made by assistants, what keeps life manageable for me is the making by hand, the practice of looking, focusing, doing pridefully hourly, daily, one small patch at a time. It also feels good knowing that my reconfiguration of castoffs is sustainable and helps to conserve the environment of the future.